The Business Doesn't Care That Your World Is Falling Apart

Meghan's bouquet Photo Credit: Kate Neal

   There was a period in my life when I was caring for my dying mother.  At the same time, I was helping care for my grandmother.  My young granddaughter was struggling through tremendous upheaval in her family and needed stability and reassurance.   My adult daughter was struggling.  And, as if life hadn't provided quite enough, a chimney collapsed in my  200-year-old house and filled it with soot.  I was exhausted.  I was overwhelmed.  And I felt very much alone.  But every morning, there was something else waiting for me.  My business.   There were clients who needed answers.  Appointments that had been scheduled., vendors who needed decisions, weddings that were still approaching, bills that still needed to be paid.  And, people who had trusted me with one of the most important days of their lives.  None of them had caused what was happening in mine.  That period taught me something about running a business that no business course ever could:  Your personal world can stop. Your business often cannot.

    We talk a great deal about entrepreneurship in terms of freedom.  Be your own boss.  Set your own schedule.  Build something that's yours.  All of that can be true.  But we don't talk nearly enough about the other side of it.  When you're the person at the top, sometimes there is nobody to whom you can say, “Can you take this for me? I can't do it today.”  There is no paid bereavement leave unless you've created enough infrastructure to give yourself one.  There may be no colleague who can automatically absorb your workload.  And your clients don't stop needing the service they've paid you to provide because something terrible has happened in your personal life.

 So you learn to compartmentalize.  I could leave a hospital room and answer a client call.  I could spend hours worrying about people I loved and then sit  down with a couple who were excitedly talking about  flowers, music and their wedding day.  And I needed to be present for them.  Not because my grief didn't matter.  Because their joy mattered, too.

 Looking back, that distinction is important to me.  Professionalism isn't pretending you're not human.  It isn't smiling while your world burns and  congratulating yourself for never letting anyone see  the smoke.  And it certainly isn't sacrificing yourself indefinitely in the name of your business.  Professionalism is understanding the responsibility that comes with accepting someone's trust, and finding a way to honor that responsibility while also acknowledging your own humanity.

    I wasn't always good at the second part.  I kept going because people needed me.  What I didn't understand very well at the time was that I needed me too.  There is a dangerous mythology around resilience, particularly among entrepreneurs.  We celebrate the person who never stops.  The business owner who works through illness.  The mother who takes the conference call from the hospital.  The  entrepreneur who suffers a devastating loss on Tuesday and is back at her desk Wednesday morning.

    We call that strength.  Sometimes it is.  And sometimes it is simply what happens when there is no safety net.  Those are not the same thing.  I've run my business for more than two decades now, and life has happened during every one of those years.  There have been wonderful seasons.  There has also been grief, family crises, financial worries, sleepless nights and days when I would have preferred to close the door on the world.  But there was work to do.  And strangely, sometimes the work helped.  Creating something beautiful for someone else didn't erase what was happening in my own life.  But it reminded me that difficult chapters aren't the whole story.  There was still a wedding coming, still a family celebrating, still something to create, still someone trusting me, still a reason to get up the next morning.  That's something I understand differently now.  Resilience isn't the absence of struggle. And professionalism isn't the absence of humanity.  Sometimes leadership means showing up.  Sometimes it means admitting that you cannot.  And wisdom may simply be learning the difference.

I once wrote during one of the hardest periods of my life that my creativity and my brides were what would keep me going and give me purpose.  Years later, I understand what I was trying to say.  I wasn't only keeping my business alive.  Sometimes my business was helping to keep me alive, too.